


Phryne Fisher's Sense of Freedom

by whopooh



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Freedom, Love, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 00:06:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9148132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whopooh/pseuds/whopooh
Summary: Phryne Fisher was freedom incarnated. She didn’t allow for any constrictions to decide over her - she shaped her own destiny. Jack had heard before about people that didn’t have a soulmate cut out for them, but he’d never met anyone until Phryne.But could it be true that she didn't have one?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of the soulmate challenge for MFMM fanfic. "Soulmate AU" is such an odd trope, it was really fun to play with!

Her sense of freedom was one of the things that fascinated him most about her.

Phryne Fisher seemed to be freedom incarnated. She didn’t allow for any constrictions to decide over her, whether societal or natural; she shaped her own destiny. Jack thought about this as he found himself in her parlour, watching her pour him a nightcap with a smile. The day before they had solved the case of the double murder at the production of _Ruddigore_. As he accepted the exquisite whisky he became aware of how much he admired her for her freedom – admired, and wished he could have been more like her.

He had heard before about people that didn’t have a soulmate cut out for them, but he’d never met anyone. Until Phryne barged into his life, crime scene by crime scene, he hadn’t even been sure those rumours were actually true. But now he had been given a real glimpse of it: how a life lived completely on one’s own premises truly could be, a life where you made all the choices by yourself.

Sitting there reclined in her chaise, Phryne was like a beacon of light in a – to be frank – rather bleak world. She was a much brighter light than that shimmering, golden glow that would surround a person whenever they entered a room where their designated soulmate was. The glow seemed to come out of their pores, making him think of sweat in the form of light, and it would flare up brightly at first, and then gradually turn down to a mild, lingering hue that made them look tanned and healthy.

That warm glow was such a familiar tell-tale sign. Young couples took pride in it and would do their utmost to display it, leaving and entering rooms more than was strictly necessary. Long-married couples wouldn’t think much about it, but would again be struck by its beauty if they had been separated for a while. People married to someone that wasn’t their soulmate usually resented it. More than one arranged the lighting in their houses to be in that exact golden hue, so that noone could spot if there was a shimmer around a person or not. Jack found that rather genious. He also found that he preferred Phryne’s energy and way of spreading brightness. To him it was Phryne Fisher – completely without that golden hue – that was the true light of Melbourne. 

It seemed her thoughts weren’t too far from his, as she spoke for the first time since he had agreed to the whisky.

”Dot is sure Dorothea was Bart’s long sought for soulmate, and that it makes her destiny doubly tragic. Do you think she was?” she asked.

Jack swivelled the whisky around in his glass before answering.

”She might have been. Though I fail to see how that would make it any more tragic than it already is.”

Phryne looked at him for a moment, obviously pleased with his answer.

”No. That doesn’t change anything,” she agreed and sipped her drink.

The question about her was on the tip of his tongue, but there was no way he was going to ask her. Instead he just looked at her and drank his whisky.

Of course he was curious about her and the topic of soulmate. But you didn’t just ask someone straight out about such a delicate thing; that would have been the most appalling break of proprierty. Instead, he had gained a glimpse here and there – Phryne laughing and declaring the whole system ridiculous at one time, Phryne biting her lip not to say something when she saw the bright golden hue surround Dot and Hugh – and they’d made him certain she was one of the unfettered ones.

He admired her freedom, but above all he admired what she made of it. It also annoyed him slightly, because it reminded him of what he could have been, if he hadn’t been so bound by honour. He was aware that his admiration and annoyance had started to metamorphose into love and adoration, and this unsettled him.

Jack thought about the grace with which she had acknowledged his sense of duty to his marriage, that time they had shared a drink in his office and talked about the war. Her response had only made her doubly desirable for him: yes, she broke boundaries and trespassed conventions, but she also respected the lines people like him wanted to keep up. Her sense of freedom didn’t make her cruel.

She enjoyed her life and she enjoyed men – preferrably the young ones, who hadn’t yet found their soulmates and were open for a bit of fun. Some of them even tried to claim she must be their soulmate, that the system must be broken when they could feel so much for her without having that glow – but she easily shrugged that away, using the system as a way out of too much committment.

Jack hadn’t had much experience of that sort of freedom. He had always done what was expected of him. He took pride in that, in being dependable and dutiful, but sometimes – and more and more lately – he wondered how it would feel like to do something that wasn’t supposed to be. Like, if he was honest, to kiss Phryne Fisher.

It was a new feeling, just a few weeks old, and one he would never admit to openly. He buried it deep within him and went on with his work. Well, perhaps he didn’t manage to bury it as deep as he strived for. He had obviously tried to protect her more than he should, and he was surprised at the anger he felt as he chastised her about making herself a target for the Latvian anarchists. The meeting in the alley with Lin Chung the other day had unsettled him further, as it made him realise just how he felt about being discarded by Phryne. The final straw was that challenge on the theatre stage, and him – without intending to – actually declaring an interest in her through Shakespeare.

This had to stop, he decided as he sat in her parlour and made sure he reigned in his expressions completely. He had to keep that kind of thoughts away, and not allow them to burst forth and reveal him. There would be no more declarations, via Shakespeare or otherwise.

***

The death of Bert and Cec’s friend seemed straight-forward at first. It started out as a car accident that might have been a deliberate murder, but it soon turned into something bigger. To a great extent of course through Phryne’s sleuthing. ”I was wondering when Bert would wheel in the heavy artillery,” he had said as Phryne turned up, and he was sure he hadn’t been able to suppress completely how much he enjoyed the fact that they had.

As they walked down an alley, following the trail of the car and jointly rolling their eyes at Hugh’s sincere note-reading, he registered how much he enjoyed being with her. Her look when he included her in the ”professionals” made his heart flutter. Not for the first time, he wondered what life would have been like if she had happened to be his soulmate. But how could she ever have? Obviously she was in a completely different realm than him, and the idea of her even having a soulmate – that she could have had that kind of destiny burdening her – felt wrong.

When they had realised the murderer was an old acquaintance of hers, Phryne insisted she should be there in the restaurant. Jack wanted there to be only police – she had already described something of her own relationship with this Dubois, and he had seen with his own eyes what the man had done to Veronique Sarcelle – but the way she set her jaw told him there was no way he could stop her. 

Jack settled for seating her right next to himself, so he could keep an eye on her as well as on the murderer. He tried to calm her down with a joke about the food, but she didn’t even seem to notice he had talked. It felt surreal to be about to witness someone from her previous life – someone who had treated her badly and still somehow had the power to make her frightened – enter into the restaurant. He had only seen a glimpse of the man before, when he had tried to shoot Bert. Would he look as evil as he obviously was? It was a ridiculous notion for a police officer, who’d seen the most innocent-looking criminals, but it popped up in his mind. A man who had tried to quench Phryne Fisher, and who had now come to Australia and broken into her house. What would he look like?

At this point in his ruminations, everything went wrong very quickly. The red raggers suddenly entered the restaurant, defiantly and with their jaws clenched, and Jack felt all control over the event slip away. Phryne rose, presumably to tell them off, but he managed to stop her and make her sit down again, changing places with her to make her even less easy to spot from the door. The man could be there any minute. Phryne seemed more scared than he’d ever seen her – he tried to talk to her to reassure her.

Then all hell broke loose.

When René Dubois entered the room, Jack saw him as if in slow motion. There seemed to be something wrong with the man, and after a second Jack realised that he was glowing in a rather bright golden light. And that the hand beside him, belonging to the fretting Phryne Fisher, did the same – emitting that revealing golden hue.

Jack stared in shock, as the significance of the golden light dawned on him. Suddenly it made sense that she had let him hurt her all those years ago, that she hadn’t been able to immediately escape. _They had glowed so beautifully together._

Dubois seemed to be too focused on the man he was about to meet to notice it himself, and Jack’s heart sunk as he realised that Phryne being there was an even worse idea than he had imagined. That glow would completely give her away. She couldn’t keep herself from trying to look at the man, and Jack needed to stop her immediately – if he didn’t notice his own glow, he most certainly would notice her golden-hued face. ”Eyes front. Phryne. Phryne,” he pleaded. Desperate, he fumbled for something to do. He grabbed her head and pulled her to him. Before he knew what happened, he was kissing her.

He was kissing those warm, elusive, red, and now slightly golden-tinged lips, as if his life depended on it. Tasting her mouth, even dipping his tongue into it, and she immediately responded in kind. It was a ploy and a gamble, but it almost overwhelmed him, and for a split second it made him forget where he was and what he was doing. _He was kissing Phryne Fisher._ They parted and looked into each other’s eye in a moment of wonder that seemed to be suspended in time.

Then he collected himself and ordered Hugh – by a significant eyebrow – to ready himself. As the red raggers went up to Dubois and Bert punched him in the face, Phryne decided to throw herself into the fray to stop it from going wrong. It spectacularly did not work out. René pulled his gun and captured Phryne – ”My Phryne” – in one swift motion. As he touched her, almost lovingly, with the tip of his black gun, first at her temple and then at her throat, they were both glowing strongly of gold. 

It was a grotesque sight, the radiance that was supposed to signify love and being in sync encircling this couple of hatred and threat. It made Jack hesitate, and when the man with the glow – Phryne’s glow, telling the world that she belonged with him, that he was entitled to the indomitable spirit of Phryne Fisher, whose lips Jack could still feel on his own – aimed his gun at her, Jack laid down his weapon and put his hands up in the air.

He was so shaken he almost wasn’t ready for Phryne’s deflection – the ingrained attentiveness from his years in the force the only thing making him enough there in the moment to barge into the man as she took his gun, at the same time shouting ”Stay back, Jack” to keep him out of her aim. 

When Phryne aimed the gun on the man she ought to love – first at his forehead, and then at his heart – Jack forgot how to breathe. The strength of her anger made her glow even richer, and Jack wondered how she could possibly shoot the man that had been determined to be her soulmate. Could she do it?

He never got the answer. Before anyone could react, René had fled, only to haphazardly be struck down by the knife in Veronique Sarcelle’s hand.

The Honourable Phryne Fisher had not killed her soulmate in cold blood, and somehow that made Jack release his breath in relief. Phryne first stood transfixed, then she sat down by the dying man, half-reclined with a knife protuding from his chest. As she did, the shimmer slowly faded from her – he was dead, and she would never again have a golden hue on her skin because someone entered the room. Phryne Fisher was, finally, completely free.

Jack crouched down beside her and asked ”You alright?” When Phryne calmly answered ”I believe I am,” he simply touched her hand for a moment and let her be.

***

Phryne was escorted home by Hugh Collins, and Jack completed his work-day at the station. The Sarcelle painting wasn’t needed as evidence anymore, and he decided to bring it home to her. That way, he could see how she was doing after the turmoil.

As he entered her parlour and quipped about the well-travelled work of art, he took her in. She was not shimmering in gold, but her face seemed to glow of its own accord. She seemed happy, and definitely back to her bright, teasing self. Jack found this a much more beautiful glow, truly bringing out the hues of her complexion, and being only about herself. He realised – so suddenly it actually hurt in his chest – that she was the most beautiful woman in the world to him, and that he had actually kissed her that same day.

”I always assumed you didn’t have a soulmate. That you were completely free,” he said, arching an eyebrow at her.

”I am completely free. Would you really call that man a soulmate?” Phryne retorted, and he had to agree. With such a soulmate, how could you ever believe in the system?

He wanted to reciprocate somehow, give something back to her – a piece of him – now that she had shown him her secret and her fear; the intimacy between them grown considerably as he saw her bravery in the face of René Dubois. He wanted to tell her his own story, about marrying his brother’s soulmate after his brother had died, and how a sense of duty could be as binding as that odd natural phenomenon of being designated a soulmate. About the double sadness of never having that golden glow together and never having any children, and the fear that maybe those things were connected. About him actually meeting his soulmate, years later, a nurse in a hospital in France where he was taken care of after a shrapnel wound, but neither of them willing to act on it since they were both bound by honour to other people. He had it all on the tip of his tongue.

But before he could say anything she opened the draping of the painting, and he realised he was looking down at her naked form stretched out on a bed as if in the throes of passion. To his own horror, he blushed. He didn’t find any words. Of course she teased him about it, relentlessy. He managed a mediocre evasion.

It was too much; he couldn’t take her nudity and her teasing together with the feelings of sadness, fear and desire he had just been through. He stood up abruptly and excused himself, claiming he needed to go back to the station. The amused ring in her voice as she bid him good night followed him half way home.

Phryne Fisher had been freed, Jack thought, but then he corrected himself: Phryne Fisher had freed herself a long time ago. She fascinated him more than ever.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, as always, to Fire_Sign for her extra pair of eyes!


End file.
